Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun? (5 page)

However, Lewis never did become one of the boys. The focused manchild remained aloof from most of the juvenile joking and cavorting the other players frequently engaged in. For example, the first-stringers had a ritual of buying miniatures of scotch or gin for 35 cents apiece before a game, then knocking them back with dispatch.

Lewis would stand off to one side observing. He never criticized, but never joined in, either.

Lewis never had much of a taste for alcohol as a young man, largely because he was an athlete, but also due to an incident that took place during a gathering at the Cooper house when he was five years old. “He loved soda,” James Cooper recounts. “They were having a party one day and he and I were drinking the soda. But he couldn’t distinguish between a drink of liquor and a drink of soda. My aunt drank 100 proof Granddad and left her cup and her chaser sitting out. I drank the chaser and he drank the Granddad. Never again did he drink any more liquor, until he was grown.”

Lewis’s athletic prowess wasn’t confined to football. He was also a shortstop for Dunbar’s baseball team. Once again, it was his commitment and drive to succeed that brought him notice on the playing field.

“He was a kid that if you didn’t know him, you may have gotten the impression he was egotistical and in love with himself,” says Dick Brown, Lewis’s junior varsity baseball coach. “But it was his drive. He had one thing that I can always appreciate and that I always tried to instill into my athletes: That is, ‘I am the best. I am the greatest.’ That drive, that desire for excellence eventually made him the man he became. It was already in him at Dunbar.

“He was always on time, he was always doing something to improve himself in whatever he did. He was one of the persons who come along rarely. I realized that he was different back then, but I didn’t expect him to go as far as he did.”

Brown, who also taught math at Dunbar and retired from coaching baseball in 1991, knew Lewis longer than any of the teenager’s other instructors, because Brown’s daughter had been a classmate of Lewis’s at St. Francis Xavier. Even though Lewis set exacting standards for himself and for his teammates, he could be tolerant of others when they made errors.

“He felt that if a guy pulled a boner, the guy felt bad enough as it was, so you didn’t have to ride him. He would say, ‘Don’t worry about it, you did your best.’ He’d try to find a nice way of getting on the kid’s back without insulting the kid,” Brown remembers.

Lewis fielded his shortstop position well. He displayed little emotion, even if calls went against him, and could hit for power. Tiger Davis remembers him studying pitchers and says Lewis would maul fastballs. Curveballs were another matter—they represented a mystery he never did unravel.

“In basketball, he was basically a bench-warmer, a last-minute substitute when a Dunbar victory appeared assured,” says teammate Red Scott. They were both guards at a school often ranked the top prep basketball school in the nation. A number of Dunbar players have gone on to play in the National Basketball Association.

Even in a limited role, however, the Lewis drive was on display. “He was a ball hawk, I can tell you that,” Scott says of Lewis’s court style.
“He wanted the ball ALL the time. Not to pass it—to shoot it. And he really didn’t have a good shot, but every time you’d look up he was calling for the ball.”

While sports was a big part of Lewis’s world in high school, so was work. Perhaps emulating his stepfather, who was moonlighting as a cab driver, working full-time in the post office job, taking classes at Morgan, and playing on the football team, Lewis took on an exceptionally heavy workload for someone in high school.

While in high school, I had jobs in my junior and senior years. During the week, I worked in a drugstore from six o’clock until ten o’clock following sports practice, which lasted from three o’clock until five o’clock. Then, maybe I’d have a late date from ten-thirty to midnight, and would be home by one o’clock. I would get about four hours of sleep, maybe an hour of study, a quick look at the sports and business pages and then I’d make a mad dash for school, which was across town.

At 16, I made a big decision. Instead of playing baseball during the summer six days a week, I took a full-time job at a country club where my grandfather worked as a captain. The pay was $50 a week—no tips permitted—but if you picked the right members to give that little extra effort to, they would find a way to “take care of you.”

I learned a lot working there, both from the staff and the members. From the staff, the virtues of being a real pro. My grandfather, Captain Sam, took tremendous pride in his work and other waiters really respected him a lot. People who were really good did not have to take a lot of “shit.” Not taking a lot of shit was the goal of every employee there.

The only sure way to avoid the bull from the bosses was to know your stuff and mind your own business. The more conscientious staff members always watched their drinking—alcoholism was a real problem. As an athlete, this was never even a slight temptation for me. I never smoked until my sophomore year of college.

From the members of the club, I learned that talk is cheap. I knew that already from my mother’s family, the Coopers, but here among so-called rich people it became really clear. A lot of the club members talked a good game, but I could tell they were not on top of their game. It showed in how they treated the staff.

One incident I remember in particular was when a quite nice lady had a special party and I busted my gut to make the service great—not only my own, but that of other workers, too. I was 17 at the time. After the party, she pulled me aside when everyone had left. She did the talking and it went something like this: “Reggie, you know your skin is dark, so you have to work harder. One day, I am sure you’ll make a good living.” One part of her message was fine, but her style was patronizing. The other part of what she said implied inferiority. She then gave me $2.

I thanked her with a nod and probably a quick look that unsettled her a little but was in no way threatening. Almost immediately, I felt sort of an athletic surge go through my body, but remained controlled and thought to myself, “You poor soul, you don’t know who stands before you. A good living! I plan to, and I will have more money than you will ever have, and I’ll have the good sense to recognize superior performance and not embarrass myself by giving only a $2 tip.”

In fact, my grandfather asked me what her tip was. I didn’t answer and he said something like, “You’re right, son, keep it to yourself. Whatever it was, it doesn’t matter—you did a helluva job. If she tipped you at all, it’s an accomplishment because word is she never tips and her status with the club is a little shaky. Always remember, your skill is what’s important. Get that and build on it and sooner or later you’ll have a big payday—count on it.”

It came fast. I had a big party of businessmen that had cocktails, dinner, and then played poker. I stayed late and did a real number. I was the last person on the staff to leave—members with families left sooner. In fact, even the parking attendants had taken off. When I saw that, I raced to the lot and started bringing up the cars one after another. Guys were slapping all kinds of money in my hand and saying thanks. Finally, at about 3
A.M
., the man who threw the party and who had told me to go home about three times that evening—and who was cold sober unlike the others—took me by the arm.

He looked me right in the eye and said, “Holy shit, kid, what are you trying to do, conquer the world?” There was a little moment that passed between the two of us as we looked each other in the eye, then he gave this little knowing smile, slapped a C note in my hand and said, “Helluva job, son.” I knew he was right. I made about $500 that night, about 10 times my weekly salary.

My last year at the club ended when I was 18. The manager was disappointed that I didn’t work there through college, but I decided I could make more money in a union job at a brewery. But from time to time I would work at the club during weekends until my sophomore year of college.

The Suburban Club, a private Jewish club in Baltimore County just a stone’s throw from the city line, led to one of the few enduring friendships of Lewis’s life. Ellis Goodman, a working-class white kid from West Baltimore, was the same age as Lewis and also in need of spending money. The ambitious teenagers used to talk about their hopes and dreams for the future.

Goodman, who worked in the food supply room in the basement, had his sights set on becoming a U.S. senator. Lewis told Goodman, “I know that what I’d like to be is the richest black man in America.” Nearly thirty years later, Goodman—by then a successful lawyer and real estate developer—and his wife Marcie met Lewis at the Harvard Club in Manhattan, one of Lewis’s favorite haunts.

“He said to Marcie, ‘You know, Ellis wanted to be a United States senator.’ And we laughed and she said, ‘What did you want to be?’ He said, ‘Well, I wanted to be the richest black man in America.’ And we laughed, because that was in his thought process. He really was one of the consummate goal setters,” Goodman recalls.

Back in their Suburban Club days, Goodman watched Lewis realize goals on a smaller scale. “He succeeded in getting what was a plum job,” Goodman recalls. “And the plum was to be a waiter assigned to the women’s cardroom. The reason that was a plum was because it put you in a position of being able to receive tips, whereas you didn’t receive tips as a regular busboy or waiter in the dining room.”

In the women’s cardroom, there were no heavy trays to lug around. The most strenuous duty was having to carry coffee, tea, and sandwiches to the tables of women playing canasta.

“He knew how to take care of those women, and it was clearly an older, almost elderly group who were the card players at the Suburban Club. He had a sense of remembering their names—if somebody would pass by, invariably he knew their name and always addressed people by their names.”

Goodman followed the stock market as a teenager and used to seek out a chef who was a stock market buff. Lewis sat in on many of those conversations, and would ask Goodman to explain things after the chef left the room. One topic never broached during Goodman’s and Lewis’s wide-ranging discussions was race. “It just never came up,” says Goodman.

“He was really a mature fellow in high school,” says William Smith, a member of Lewis’s class voted least likely to succeed who later went on to become a dentist and Army colonel. “Reggie knew how to read a stock market sheet. I didn’t even know what a stock market sheet was.”

With his busy schedule, Lewis had become something of a phantom at home. “He was never there,” Tony Fugett says. “He would always come in late, like after practice, because he played sports and he would always leave real early. So it wasn’t like he was at the house a lot.”

The brothers became extremely close later in life, but while Lewis was in high school they were “very, very distant. We just didn’t have a lot in common and we didn’t share much. He saw himself as a little man, . . . not a high school kid.”

Lewis wasn’t home much, agrees his eldest brother, Jean Fugett, Jr. “What I remember about Reg was that he was always working. He would come home from school, athletic practice, or work and then spend the rest of the evening on his homework,” he says.

“Back then, this puzzled me. I didn’t see the payoff for doing the homework at the time. Now, of course, I do,” says Fugett, who went on to graduate cum laude from Amherst and then proceeded to get a law degree from George Washington University while playing football for the Washington Redskins.

“Reg was always focusing on the future. The next accomplishment. The next objective. It was as if he was always preparing himself for something,” Fugett adds.

A schoolmate of Lewis’s, Robert Bell, now a judge on the Maryland Court of Appeals, recalls how Lewis worked one job after another. Bell worked with Lewis a few times—he vividly remembers one minimum-wage gig he took at Lewis’s urging that turned out to be “one of the worst experiences I’ve ever had.” During a college football game at Memorial Stadium, Lewis arranged for Bell to get a job filling soda cups while Lewis hawked them to the crowd. Bell apparently failed to sign the required paperwork, however, resulting in a day’s work with no pay.

Another of Lewis’s money-making schemes had them pulling a float along a downtown boulevard in a Thanksgiving Day parade, labor for which Bell not only got paid but received a free box lunch.

Although these endeavors were rare for Bell, they were commonplace for Lewis. His hectic schedule took its toll on his grades. He was ranked 118th out of 196 students when he graduated from Dunbar.

Academically, I spent time on history and the social sciences, but never caught up on the sciences. To this day, I feel inadequate in biology and physics. I didn’t know where to start or even get help. I muddled through and hate to admit most of my lab experiments were copied word for word from other students. I would like to do physics over.

Fatigue from playing three sports, holding down several jobs, and studying would sometimes overcome Lewis in the classroom. His classmates would catch him fast asleep behind his French book. “Reggie would be asleep big time,” William Smith, one of his classmates, recalls with a chuckle. “He’d appear to be looking down at the book, but he had this remarkable ability to get back into things if he was called upon, as if nothing had ever happened. He shucked and jived his way through a lot of classes.”